


Riptide

by betts



Series: Destruction of Art [1]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Explicit Consent, F/M, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Kylo Ren Is Only Kind Of An Asshole, Post-Break Up, Prequel, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Unhappy Ending, Unsafe Sex, it's just an unfortunate side effect of this fic, leading up to kylux in the next fic of the series, the author doesn't want to hurt you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-01 08:38:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6510919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betts/pseuds/betts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When still she hears nothing, Rey pounds on the door again. “If you don’t open the door, I’m leaving it out here.” Nothing. “I brought your <i>Yankee Hotel Foxtrot</i> vinyl. It would be a shame if someone took it.”</p><p>She’s just about to give up when Ben opens the door. </p><p>Yep. This was a terrible idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Riptide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celestialdisturbances](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestialdisturbances/gifts).



> I dedicate this fic to May to make it look like I had a reason to write it other than feeling sad and angsty.
> 
> The sequel to this is going to be a kylux fic that will include past!reylo. Then the third installment, if I end up writing it, will include some reylo too. Hopefully.

Rey pounds on the door with the side of her fist. Inside, she hears nothing. Outside in the apartment hallway she can smell weed, cigarettes, and beneath it, the heavy undercurrent of commercial cleaning agents. Muffled sounds of increasing television volumes compete from other apartments. But Ben’s remains silent.

“I found some of your shit,” Rey says, over the white noise of drywall-obscured life. “I’m just dropping it off.”

An hour ago, she had texted him, _I found some of your shit. I’m coming by to drop it off._

Ben’s response had been, _Ok._

When still she hears nothing, Rey pounds on the door again. “If you don’t open the door, I’m leaving it out here.” Nothing. “I brought your _Yankee Hotel Foxtrot_ vinyl. It would be a shame if someone took it.”

She doesn’t know why she wants to see him. She could just put the box on the ground and walk away, knowing full well Ben will open the door and take it and that he doesn’t want to see her. But maybe it’s the fact that he doesn’t want to see her that makes her wait in the hallway, just to watch him lose this battle, like he lost the battle of their break-up, like he’ll hopefully lose every battle in his pathetic life.

She’s just about to give up when he opens the door.

Yep. This was a terrible idea.

They’d dated for five years, lived together for three, and even now, with the roiling disdain between them, looking at his stupid face still takes her breath away. The earnest depth in his eyes. The constant mess of his hair. The plushness of his lips and the way they feel-- _felt_ \--on her body.

She hates him. She hates everything about him.

And of course, he looks just like he always does--tattered sweatpants and no shirt, a Lucky Strike tucked behind his ear, and that damn _look_ on his face. The constant apologetic one, like a puppy who pissed on the rug. He couldn’t just be cruel. He couldn’t sever ties with immaturity, _Never speak to me again!_ s like everyone else on the planet. No, he has to be remorseful. Repentant. _Kind_. The boy she fell in love with as a teenager is still there under the complexity and arrogance and all the other wonderful-terrible things she secretly finds endearing about him.

“Hey,” he says. She can feel the tether between them, pulling them together, a half-decade of habitual hello-kisses dying hard.

Instead of stepping forward and slotting their lips together followed by maybe pushing him around a little and yelling at him--and he’d let her, he’d always let her--she shoves the box in his chest. “There. Was that so hard?”

She wants him to take the bait. Start an argument. But he doesn’t. He won’t. “You wanna come in?”

Fuck him. _Fuck him_. Fuck him for being polite when she wants to set him on fire.

“Sure.”

Later, he hands her tea in a cup his grandmother had given them when they owned nothing, teal with the word _Hawaii!_ in pink script. She’d asked Padme about it over one of their family dinners--Han’s birthday, maybe--and Padme had explained that it was a souvenir from their 1985 vacation to Oahu. For three years, Rey considered this her mug, but now it’s just _a_ mug.

Ben didn’t need to ask her how she took it--so much milk and sugar it was really just milky sugar water. He doesn’t own any furniture yet (and knowing him, he probably never will), so Rey sits against the wall with her legs tucked to her chest. She had discarded her boots by the door because the carpet is still fluffy from having been shampooed so recently, and digs her toes in it while thinking about _Die Hard_. It was Christmas Eve the last time they watched it together, drunkenly wrapping presents for Han and Leia and Luke and Padme and Anakin and everyone else at Ben’s huge family Christmas morning.

She remembers they had sex that night, good sex--Ben had gone down on her right on the living room floor, her pants and underwear discarded on a pile of wrapping paper tubes--until she came twice, and then he fucked her hard and perfect and finished quickly because he knew she was tired and they had to wake up early the next morning. She had a lovely conversation with Leia over Christmas breakfast while her bra straps chafed the rug burn on her shoulders.

She was part of a family once. Now she doesn’t feel part of anything at all.

Ben sits beside her, his own mug in hand--one she doesn’t recognize, and maybe that hurts worse. “How have you been?”

“Do you care?”

He gives her a level look, bordering on condescending, and she never has nor ever will admit that she likes being condescended to by him. “Yes.”

“I’m fine.” She takes a sip of her tea because she can’t retain eye contact with him too long or she’ll forget all the reasons she loathes him. She’s weak, she’s so weak-- “And you?”

He huffs a sad laugh, dimples dotting either side of his mouth, crooked teeth lightly stained by an unfortunate tobacco habit and an even worse coffee one. When they first met, he had braces. He got them taken off a week before prom, and for a solid six months, he had straight teeth. But he never wore his retainer, and he didn’t have the courage to tell his mother he’d lost it when he cleaned out his locker at the end of senior year. Rey may hate him now, but she’ll take that secret to the grave.

“I’ve been better.”

She is, admittedly, not as mature as Ben about this. “Surely one of your filthy trollops can suck your dick and make things better?”

She expects a self-deprecating pithy retort, maybe, _I would but they all have clients right now_. Instead he says, “Is that what you want?”

“Of course not,” she replies before she can think better of it. Her stomach drops at his open admission to seeing (fucking) other people. Not three months ago, he was still denying it up and down, lying to her face about it even though she knew. She just _knew_ , somehow, like she could read his mind.

He smiles again, wan and sad like how she feels, but her face isn’t nearly as telling as his. Years ago, upon learning about entropy and the inevitable heat death of the universe, he had spent several days crying off and on. It was the strangest acceptance of death she’d seen in someone else, most people having met it at a younger age than Ben apparently did. Who knew advanced physics would pop his mortality cherry.

A light jingling creeps up on them, followed by a chubby gray cat with a pink nose. Ben wanted a cat a year after they moved in together as a sort of last ditch effort to repair their dwindling relationship, really the entropy thing all over again in a different form. They found her at a shelter and named her Colors.

A lump rises in Rey’s throat at the sight of her. This isn’t her cat anymore. This isn’t her cat--

But Colors bumps right into her shin and begins purring, and that’s it, that’s all Rey can handle. Tears distort her vision and she fights against the tremble of her chin. She scratches behind Colors’ ears as she takes in a shuddering breath.

“She misses you,” Ben says quietly. _I miss you_ , he means.

“I miss her.” She doesn’t know what she means.

Rey gets a grip on herself and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. Ben loses whatever battle he’s fighting with himself--because he always does--and shifts closer to her, puts an arm around her.

 _We don’t have to do this,_ she expects him to say. She hopes he’ll say. _Things can go back to the way they were._

The silence that clings to the space around them hurts worse than if he had just said it, if he had just asked for her back. Then she could say, _All right, let’s try it,_ and they could pretend none of it ever happened. Padme’s birthday is coming up--Rey doesn’t know what to do with the hat she had knitted as a gift; she should have brought it with her today. Now she’ll have to come back sometime, or not give it to her at all.

The weight of Ben’s body is heavy and familiar. His touch soothes like balm on a festering wound. She wakes up every morning with a gaping emptiness inside of her, walks about day after day feeling like she’s missing a limb. She wonders how people can look at her and not know, not see the void, the entropy that has dissolved her very being.

So she leans into him. And he brings her closer, because he’s always more willing to move her than himself, which is symbolic of something, she thinks. He smells like he always has--smoke and leather and really not good at all, but that’s the charm of Ben: nothing about him is particularly nice, but everything about him is honest.

She looks up at him. They’re close, too close for two people who are working so desperately and necessarily to part ways. And she’s mad about it, mad that tears stain her cheeks and not his for once, mad that she’s losing today’s battle. She’s so mad that when he inches closer and presses their lips together, she lets him out of sheer malice. And when she sighs into him, it’s out of disappointment.

Kissing Ben feels like stepping into a warm home after walking miles and miles in a blizzard. Sitting in a patch of sunlight with eyes closed. Crawling into bed at the end of a terrible day.

Ben parts her lips with his tongue and the kiss heats, deepens. He cups her neck and she can feel the rough calluses of his fingertips grace her skin. There was a time when he wanted to be a musician, a guitarist. She supported him in a benign way, as everyone should for their loved one’s pipe dreams, but was secretly relieved when he found writing to satisfy his mercilessly creative bent instead.

Rey can’t remember the last time they kissed like this. After being together so long, it stopped feeling like anything--an odd, unnecessary habit like how Ben has to sleep with socks on for some reason. She doesn’t want to know things like that about him anymore. She wants to forget all of it: his Social Security Number, his peanut butter preferences, his deepest darkest secret which is actually neither deep nor particularly dark (that his father had spent ten years in prison during Ben's adolescence).

But this kiss feels like the first instead of the last. Rey sets her tea on the carpet and situates herself onto his lap, astride his thighs. His hands--his big, hard hands--wrap around her hips while her fingers tangle in his hair. She tosses the Lucky Strike away and bites his bottom lip, sucks it between her teeth. He moves up underneath her t-shirt, his warm touch against her bare skin making her wet already. She shouldn’t have worn leggings, she should have known better--

He reaches under her bra and thumbs over a nipple, easy as breathing having done it hundreds of times before. The pleasure of it shocks her into reality again and she pulls away. “We can’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a terrible person and I hate you.”

He searches her eyes, expression mostly impassive but for the searing heat in his gaze, and replies, “I still love you.”

“I still love you too,” she says before shoving their mouths together again.

She grinds down on him; he's big and thick and hard, always ready and waiting for her. She’d never had sex with anyone but him, and still doesn’t want anyone else. The thought of him touching other people in the same way he touches her-- _touched her_ \--makes her sick. She stays awake at night sometimes plagued with the thought, wondering how long it will take to stop hurting. Knowing that her rage will turn to apathy eventually makes her saddest of all.

The head of his cock digs against her clit in a way that forces her breath stop in her throat. They’re wearing too many layers--she needs him inside her, needs him to fill her up, to get rid of this horrible emptiness she’s been carrying around for months.

He wraps his arms around her and bends forward to lay her on the ground. His laptop cord digs into the small of her back and she arches up to move it. He takes the opportunity to tug at the elastic of her leggings and underwear and pull them off of her. His eyes flick down her body; he hasn’t looked at her like this in years, like he wants her, like she’s someone worth wanting. He used to wake up every morning and kiss her body all over until she woke up too, sensitive and groggy and already happy, worlds better than any alarm clock. Then as he’d slide between her legs, lips grazing the skin of her inner thighs, he’d ask: _Will you marry me?_

And she would card her fingers through his hair and shift her hips closer to his mouth and say, _Not today, baby._

_When?_

_Ask me again tomorrow._

She never said yes.

The soft focus of the memory fades into the sharp, agonizing edges of the present. He leans over her and nibbles at her earlobe, kisses her neck and trails down her body. He rucks her shirt and sports bra up and sucks on a nipple. “C’mon,” she tells him, and shoves a little at his shoulders. He laughs lightly against her ribs and lays open-mouthed kisses on her belly and finally, _finally_ settles between her legs.

Sex between them has always been efficient, more assisted masturbation than any semblance of lovemaking. Ben knows exactly what Rey likes, exactly how each noise and movement corresponds with what she needs. He can get her off in moments if he wanted, and several times he has: in public, pulling her into alleyways and fucking her against cold brick. In the car while he’s driving, her legs spread in the passenger seat while he fingers her. One time at a party, both of them drunk, closed off together in a dark corner--two fingers deep and pounding against her clit. She cried out when she came, but no one could hear her over the throbbing music.

His mouth on her cunt feels different now, somehow. Maybe he’s learned a thing or two since sleeping with other people. Maybe he’s forgotten what she likes. Maybe it’s in her head. He moans as he kisses and laves at her, fingers digging into the meat of her thighs. Back when they first started exploring sex but before they actually had sex, eating out had been Ben’s favorite thing to do. He did it for hours and hours on end. Even when Rey said she couldn’t get off again, he just took it as a challenge. They placed bets on how many times he could get her to come in a day; closest without going over had to call in the pizza order.

He slides a finger into her and she sighs. She doesn’t want to grip his hair and grind against his face, doesn’t want to let him know how much she wants this, but she does anyway, because she knows he likes it, knows it eggs him on to go harder, do better. Such a big important family, so easy for him to get ignored--all he wants is to feel valued, useful. For so long, she liked giving him that. But now she continues to do so and hates it.

When he adds a finger and presses his tongue a little harder, moves it a little faster, she’s done for. Her orgasm builds on rapid breaths, hips moving in time with his hand. She reaches the top and holds her breath, holds it all in while he keeps her on the precipice like she’s trained him to do. Then he flicks his tongue once and the first wave crashes over her. Her back arches and she cries out, pulling his hair and rocking against his mouth.

She doesn’t give herself time to question it. “Come here, come here,” she tells him, breathless, scrabbling at his shoulders so he’ll kiss her again.

He wipes his face with the back of his hand, which she’s always found mercilessly hot. Then he does that thing boys do, taking off their pants while on their knees. She’s seen it in porn, which they used to watch together to make fun of, until it stopped being funny. Then on, they’d made it a habit of taking turns picking porn vids before bed. Sometimes it led to lazy sex; sometimes they just fell asleep.

Rey has always loved receiving oral, but the rest of the wide world of sex is hit or miss. She tolerates penetration. If she shopped around in the one-night-stand department, she might find a smaller cock more pleasant. As it stands, Ben is enormous--another fact they discovered from watching porn together--so her reluctance toward sex might be purely a logistical issue.

The single caveat being: she likes sex when it feels wrong. And right now, it’s the wrongest it could ever be. She should tell him to go put on a condom even though they haven’t had to use one in years, not since she started taking birth control, and it's not like either of them had had sex with anyone before anyway. Ben’s been _around_ now, though, so really they should be safe. But she doesn’t want to be safe, she just wants fucked.

His length slides against her wetness, each brush of his cock over her clit sending an oversensitive shiver through her body. He tastes like her when their lips meet again, like he should. His mouth is warm and his hand grips her thigh and his whole body is tensed with restraint. He kisses across her face, up her jaw, mutters against her neck, “May I?”

One day, Rey will have sex with someone who isn’t Ben, and she knows, objectively, that her future lover will not ask _May I?_  when he wants to enter her. She doesn’t know where or how he learned this, but always--every single time--he asks. On the day she has sex with someone who doesn’t, she isn’t sure how she’s going to feel about it. Maybe nothing. Or maybe Ben ruined her. She doesn’t let herself think about him _May I?-_ ing the others he’s slept with.

She should tell him no, leave now with a perfectly adequate orgasm and a shred of dignity, but instead she says, “Yes. Please,” like she’s dying for it.

He slides into her in one long, slow movement, his face buried in the crook of her neck. She wraps her legs around him and scratches at his broad, muscular back of which she knows every single mole better than the stars at night, burned onto her memory along with his phone number and his stupid laugh and the way he looks when he first wakes up in the morning--soft, crinkled eyes and greasy hair, deep voice and his joints popping as he stretches. _Coffee or tea?_ he always asked after his daily marriage proposal. She’d mutter a response into her pillow, and he’d go about his morning tasks and scrape the snow off her car, then he’d set her coffee-or-tea by the bed while she slowly woke up.

Now, he fucks her so hard she barely has time to catch her breath. Her shirt is bunched underneath her uncomfortably. The bun she’d been wearing has come untied, half her hair having fallen out of it. Ben has always been able to read her mind a little, not as much as vice versa, but enough that he scoops her in his arms and says, “Hold on.”

He pulls her up so they’re in lotus, her settled on his lap, him controlling the rhythm from below. He sinks deeper into her this way, kisses and bites at her chest and neck and lips. He rarely makes any noise while he’s fucking, always singularly focused on the task at hand.

Rey can count the number of times she’s had an orgasm during intercourse on one hand--once while she was high and the other times with the aid of a vibrator--but when Ben licks the pad of his thumb and circles it against her clit, she can already feel her second climax beginning to burn through her. It’s the wrongness, she thinks. The shame of it. If she’d known breaking up with Ben would lead to sex like this, she would have done it sooner.

She rests her forehead against his, eyes squeezed shut so she doesn’t have to look at him, at his flushed cheeks and chest and how the tips of his ears have turned pink. Mostly she doesn’t want to look at the way he’s looking at her, like he’s still in love, the idiot. Hanging onto a ghost, a specter of what their relationship used to be.

She has no control anymore, letting her body give way to the pleasure cresting over her. She comes with stopped breath this time, shattering their rhythm into shallow, disjointed movements. Her walls clench around him, and his body freezes, tenses. He releases inside of her while waves continue to shudder through her. They’ve never come at the same time before--she’d always thought such a thing was a myth.

Their movements still but for their heaving chests, sweat-slick bodies clinging to one another. He kisses her throat, nuzzles his nose against it, rubs his hands slowly up and down her back. Two thoughts war with one another: she needs to leave _now_ , and she never wants to leave again.

“I’m always gonna love you,” he says into the crook of her neck. The words reverberate through her, settling into her veins like poison.

“I don’t care,” she lies.

She climbs off of him and uses the bathroom. While she sits on the toilet she fixes her hair by feel so she doesn’t have to look at herself in the mirror. Ben’s toothbrush rests on a folded paper towel, the bristles splayed out because he brushes his teeth too roughly. A discarded hair tie sits next to it with some errant black hairs curled around it.

When she finishes, she turns his toilet paper roll around the way he hates.

She re-enters the living room with as much dignity as a person can muster only wearing a shirt and bra. The soggyness of putting on wet underwear makes her cringe, but at least it diverts her focus from Ben, who had the decency of putting his pants back on. Her leggings are soaked at the crotch and that makes her cringe too for a whole new reason, guilt and shame at letting herself do this, at letting him do this to her. Letting them do this to each other.

“Are you hungry?” he asks. She can feel his eyes on her as she hobbles into her leggings. “I have--”

“No,” she replies. She can’t find her keys. Where are her keys?

Ben stands and hands them to her. She finally looks at him again, and immediately regrets it. Every atom in her body wants to fall into bed with him and take a post-coital nap, limbs tangled together until Ben has to move because his arm has gone numb. Then she’d curl around him as the big spoon and fall back asleep with her forehead and nose pressed against his spine. Maybe they’d wake up after and order too much drive-thru food and watch cooking shows.

She takes the keys from his hands, lets her touch linger on him a beat too long. “I need to go.”

She wants him to say, _No, stay_ , or maybe ask, _When will you come by again?_ or the worst one, _Take me back. I need you._

But he doesn’t need her. He doesn’t want her to come back. He doesn’t secretly wish she would stay. He knows it’s over like she knows it’s over, and there’s nothing left to do but leave.

Colors threads around her ankles, purring, but Rey doesn’t lean down to pet her.

“If you ever want to come visit her, just let me know,” Ben says.

“Sure.” Rey hesitates by the door. Maybe it would be better if she picked a fight, egged him on until he had some reaction other than exhaustion. When he was younger, before he found pot and emotional sublimation, he used to throw tantrums that terrified her. She was grateful when he grew out of them at eighteen, having mostly to do with moving out of his parents’ house and disconnecting himself with all the things that made him angry. But now she’d kill to see that passion again, not the kind that gives way to desperation sex, but the kind that leads to broken drywall and swollen vocal cords.

She doesn’t do any of that, though. She doesn’t acknowledge the physical, visceral, heavy ache in her chest. She doesn’t think about the familiarity of his face etched into her memory as an extension of her own identity. She doesn’t turn around and say she’s changed her mind, _let’s grab some dinner_.

She doesn’t even say goodbye.

She just leaves.  


**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by [ship](http://www.shiphitsthefan.tumblr.com).
> 
> Come yell at me on [tumblr](http://www.bettydays.tumblr.com) or [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/betty_days).


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